Monday, May 20, 2013

Ray Manzarek (1939-2013)

I
don’t often share the fact that I’m not too distantly related to Jim Morrison,
and when I do I feel weird about it. But: it’s a fact. Jim Morrison was my Mom’s
second cousin. I found this out when I inexplicably got a Doors t-shirt for my
birthday in December of 1990 from my extremely southern Grandmother Peanut of all people. I think she
wanted me to get into genealogy.

Instead
I got into The Doors, and very nearly, if I hadn’t been too smart to think The
Doors were all that cool of a band even at the tender age of eleven, drugs.
But: I listened to all the records and read all the books, even including some
of Morrison’s awful poetry. The result is I know a lot about The Doors. I
probably know more about The Doors than I know about any other rock group, even
though they are something like my 90th favorite band. And they only rank
that high because the dude is my cousin.

Ray
Manzarek died today. He had bile duct cancer. It’s a sad day. Based on
everything I’ve read about him, he seemed like a nice guy. He was a good
musician, too. Ray’s an underrated reason why people today talk about The Doors
more often than they talk about Herman’s Hermits or The Dave Clark Five.
Morrison’s dark charisma is of course the biggest reason the band achieved
greater notoriety than those other 60’s pop groups, but from a sonic
perspective they also put the organ front and center and had a guy in Ray
Manzarek that actually knew how to play it. So what if he was proto-Rick Wakeman. He had no way of knowing that.

When
you listen to a Doors song, you know it’s a Doors song, and Manzarek’s Hammond
is probably the first thing you notice. Aside from the yelping and growling on
deeper album cuts, Morrison was no great shakes as a vocalist. His lyrics are
either great or weirdly submoronic, depending on who you ask (there’s a special
kind of dumb reserved for that which purports to be enlightened). Morrison’s
main contribution to the annals of rock was his theatricality as a live
performer, where he was able during his brief tenure to bend time and space to his unwholesome
whim like few before or since (Nick Cave and Alan Vega come to mind). But. Manzarek’s
organ was the musical hook that brought the average teenybopper into the arena of live performance, where
Morrison had his way with them. Without that lilting organ on “Light My Fire,”
there wouldn’t be a crowd for Morrison to psycholigize and/or show his dick to.

Were
The Doors a great band? Probably not. But they were probably the best possible
band that a band like The Doors could have been. Probably to a degree which is incredible
given the likelihood of its constituent parts not to amount to much. As a
theatrical enterprise, The Doors explored territory that no previous band had
explored, which made them bigger than they actually were, and this happened
almost totally by an accident of alchemy. With another front man they would
have been less interesting but possibly more solidly themselves from a musical
perspective, presenting kind of a more unified Moody Blues vibe. With a lesser
organist they might have been a more hip band to reference, but nobody
eulogizes the guy who played organ for The Seeds.

If
in the wake of this sad news about Ray Manzarek you find yourself caught up in
a reappraisal of The Doors’ music, remind yourself of this: no matter how much
you might prefer to ignore the fact, the world needs Ray Manzareks. Somebody
has to set the stage for greatness. Also: his subtle, thankless vamping
probably kept more than a few venues from rioting while Morrison was backstage
puking acid tabs into a gypsy’s butthole, or whatever it was he was doing in
Cleveland in 1969. Who knows. Ray Manzarek might have saved lives simply by being a mellow dude.